South African regulation of online casinos licensed in a foreign jurisdiction

Advances in technology brought about new popular gambling activities such as online gambling (sometimes called trans-border e-gaming) in South Africa and abroad, demand new regulatory structures since the current laws on gambling do not have provisions for online gambling. This article addresses the legality of engaging in online gambling within the South African borders by casino operators who are licensed in a foreign jurisdiction, giving rise to the issue of determining the place where the act of gambling takes place between a player who is in South Africa while engaging on the Internet with a server in another country. Although this article deals with the South African perspective, realizing that South Africa is a developing country and the law relating to the Internet might be behind, a reference to the online gambling law of United States (US) is made to showcase a need for attention to regulate online gambling in both developing and developed countries.     

From gatekeepers to publishers: Liability of internet intermediaries in India for hosting defamatory content

This article aims to analyse the liability of Internet intermediaries in India for hosting defamatory content. In the absence of any statutory law relating to online defamation, the courts in India have had to rely upon comparable developments in the United Kingdom to define the contours of liability of the intermediaries for facilitating the publication of defamatory content on the Internet. However, affixing liability on intermediaries in the absence of similar statutory immunities provided to them under the UK law may prove prejudicial to the intermediaries. Therefore, this article argues that India should enact a comprehensive law to statutorily limit the grounds on which liability may be imposed on Internet intermediaries for hosting online defamatory content. This article further argues that India should adopt and codify the ‘notice and notice plus’ approach to intermediary liability as it ensures that intermediaries are not held liable as publishers for hosting the defamatory content, but in the meantime are also encouraged to take active steps to ensure effective justice to the victims of online defamation.     

The USPS as an OSP: A Remedy for Users’ Online Privacy Concerns

New digital technologies, and a legal system that has failed to keep pace, are allowing government and the private sector to engage in unparalleled unauthorized surveillance of online personal data contained in emails and in the aggregation of users’ online searches. This article argues that the U.S. Postal Service — compelled to protect communications privacy by its enabling statute, the Fourth Amendment, and other federal laws — should provide email and browser-search engine services to shield users from unauthorized online behavioral marketing and tracking by the private sector and metadata collection by government, and, just as important, give users legal remedies against such abuses. To that end, this article provides a legal analysis and rationale to support the USPS's authority to offer such nontraditional postal services.     

Law,culture and massively multiplayer online games

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are now a major international phenomena. Millions of people can play together online, readily navigating boundaries between nations, languages and legal jurisdictions. The communities around some of these games are huge, of a size equivalent to a large city or small nation. This article explores three themes, labelled for conceptual purposes ‘games as legal spaces’, ‘games need lawyers’, and ‘lawyers need games’. It argues that games are inherently legal spaces, infused with legal-ness in a variety of ways; that more direct engagement from the legal community would be of tremendous value in making these systems, and the entertainment spaces which they regulate, ‘better’; and that we have a great deal to learn about law and about the regulation of the online space from games. The article concludes with the proposition that there is an opportunity for impactful knowledge exchange between legal scholars, MMOG developers and publishers, and the gaming community.     

Using financial intelligence to target online fraud victimisation: applying a tertiary prevention perspective

Abstract

It is well established that policing in an online environment is fraught with challenges. To combat losses attributed to online fraud, Australia has seen the emergence of a victim-oriented approach, which uses financial intelligence to identify potential victims and deliberately intervenes through the sending of a letter. This approach predominantly targets victims of advance fee fraud and romance fraud who are sending money to West African countries. The current article presents three Australian case studies: Project Sunbird (West Australian Police and West Australian Department of Commerce); Operation Disrepair (South Australian Police); and the National Scams Disruption Project (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission). The article locates these cases within existing theory on crime prevention, using available data to document initial positive outcomes. Overall, this article supports the use of a victim-oriented tertiary approach to online fraud, and advocates its potential to reduce both repeat victimisation and the harm incurred through online fraud.     

The Role of Emotion in Land Regulation: An Empirical Study of Online Advocacy in Authoritarian Asia

Scholarly interest about online advocacy in authoritarian settings is rapidly growing. With one of Asia's most active social media, Vietnam offers a promising site to investigate how online advocates navigate around state censorship to influence regulatory decisionmaking. Much research about online advocacy focuses on rational discourse, and fails to ask why satire and ridicule can change regulatory outcomes when reasoned debate fails. This article considers two cases studies where online advocates changed regulatory outcomes in Vietnam. It investigates why the regulators were sensitive to moral censure in social media, and responded to appeals for solidarity, but were reluctant to engage in rational public deliberation. These findings reveal insights into how online advocacy can trigger emotional responses in officials that transform the regulatory environment. The article concludes that rather than constituting cognitive missteps, emotions are integral to government regulation in Vietnam.     

Regulating behaviours on the European Union internet,the case of spam versus cookies

This article examines the soft-law politics of regulating behaviours on the internet in the European Union (EU) context. It shows the struggles behind internet standards, and delegation of power to commercial actors, while looking at spam and web-cookies as a case study. This article argues that by creating a false division between private and public spaces on the internet, it was possible to legitimize certain practices over others, despite being similar. In this way, spam was categorized as unsolicited communication associated with private space, whereas web-cookies were categorized as wanted communication in public space. By influencing and lobbying EU legislation and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technical standards, the advertising industry and tech companies simultaneously authorize and institutionalize their own practices and illegalize people’s ‘problematic’ behaviour and other advertising companies. In this way, EU legislation and internet standards create a naturalized discourse that institutionalizes the roles of different actors in the online market, while emphasizing the central role of commercial actors in creating, defining, managing and enforcing the online market. Thus, spam operates as a regulatory tool applied to any type of behaviour that can interfere with the functioning of the EU e-commerce.     

There's more to it than data protection – Fundamental rights,privacy and the personal/household exemption in the digital age

Heated debates triggered by the plans to introduce the “right to be forgotten” exposed problems the all-encompassing application of rules on data processing may cause in practice. The purpose of this article is to discuss the compatibility of these rules with the rapidly evolving online environment in the context of the need to guarantee human rights on the internet. The author argues that there is an imbalance in the protection of individual rights online. It results from the limited application of personal/household exception and, in general, the narrow understanding of the concept of online privacy. According to the author in order for data protection laws to flesh out not only the fundamental right of data protection, but also play a mediatory role in balancing other rights, the application of the personal/household exception should be extended to include private online activities. This would reflect the complex character of the very concept of online privacy, diversity of actors and activities shaping online “territories”, as well as the increasingly heterogeneous fabric of the Web.     

Regulation of online pharmacy: an Australian perspective

This article argues that existing Australian regulations do not adequately cover online pharmacies or Internet advertising of medicines and that existing penalties and sanctions are often ineffective, potentially placing public health and safety at risk. Suggestions are made for future regulatory approaches. It is concluded that as well as an effective program of public education, cautious domestic legislative reform is necessary to ensure specific regulation of Australian online pharmacy practice and Internet advertising of medicines. In addition, the global nature of the Internet demands international co-operation and increased regulator and consumer vigilance.     

Beyond the Gaze and Well Beyond Wolfenden: The Practices and Rationalities of Regulating and Policing Sex Work in the Digital Age

Drawing on the largest study of the United Kingdom online market in sexual labour to date, this article examines the legal and regulatory consequences as aspects of sex work increasingly take place within an online environment. Our research shows that while governmental policy has not kept abreast of these changes, the application of current laws (which have, since the 1950s, focused on public nuisance and, more recently, trafficking and modern slavery) are pernicious to sex workers and unsuited to recognizing and responding to the abuses and exploitation in online markets in sexual labour. These injustices are likely to be exacerbated if policies and policing do not better align with the realities of these markets in the twenty‐first century. This demands a more nuanced regulatory approach which recognizes that people may engage in sex work of their own volition, but which also addresses conditions of labour and criminal exploitation.     

Tying and bundling by online platforms – Distinguishing between lawful expansion strategies and anti-competitive practices

The assessment of tying and bundling practices under Art. 102 TFEU in the case of online platforms will require adjusting current practice to correspond to their technical complexity and multi sided nature. Although the current framework may appear suitable to deal with this kind of abuses, The recent cases against Google show that there is still much uncertainty in practice. Therefore this article seeks to address the matter of tying and bundling by online platforms and provide guidance with regard to the application of the current legal framework to such complex cases in order to prevent false finding in ongoing and future cases.This article shows that finding an abuse of dominance in platform related cases requires great diligence as the joint provision of products or services and market power leveraging by platforms is an inherent part of their commercial evolvement. In this regard the article offers insight on how to distinguish between anticompetitive tying and bundling practices and legitimate expansion strategies. In order to do so, the article discusses how such practices can manifest and how they should be addressed under the framework of EU competition law in light of the similar competitive concerns they share with non-platform cases.     

The internet balancing formula

The Internet Balancing Formula (IBF) is a mathematical instrument to increase the rational and transparent aspects of balancing conflicting human rights online. It is based on the relative weight and intensity of conflicting rights. The numerical value of these rights is arrived at by applying mathematical scales to various input elements. This formula is easy to use and could be applied globally by private online stakeholders. Robert Alexy has entered into debate with Susi, pointing out similarities and differences between his Weight Formula and the IBF, and advancing the concreteness thesis. Alexy views the Weight Formula as general and abstract, whereas the IBF is specific and particular. Both Alexy and Susi are of the opinion that such formula is highly needed to respond to the theoretical and practical uncertainties and divergent practices of online stakeholders. Susi replies to Alexy's critique in a separate article.     

The Continuing Relevance of Marxism to Critical Criminology

Since the early 1990s, the ``new directions' in Critical Criminology have consciously excluded Marxism as being out-dated. This article critically assesses the fundamental theoretical shifts within critical criminology. It argues that Marxism remains as relevant as ever for analysing crime, criminal justice, and the role of the state. There is a great need for critical criminologists to redirect their attention back to Marxist theory by developing and extending its tools of critical theoretical analysis. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The legal geographies of transnational cyber-prosecutions: extradition,human rights and forum shifting

This article describes legal and human rights issues in three cases of transnational online offending involving extradition requests by the United States (US). These cases were selected as all suspects claimed the negative impacts of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were sufficient to deny extradition on human rights grounds. We demonstrate how recent developments in UK and Irish extradition law raise human rights and prosecutorial challenges specific to online offending that are not met by established protections under domestic and internationally sanctioned approaches to extradition or human rights law. In these cases, although the allegedly unlawful conduct occurred exclusively online and concurrent jurisdiction enables prosecution at both the source and location of harm, we demonstrate why national courts hearing extradition challenges are extremely reluctant to shift the trial forum. We conclude by discussing the implications of the new geographies of online offending for future criminological research and transnational criminal justice.     

The Music Industry and the Legislative Development of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Online Service Provider Provision

The online service provider provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—Section 512 of the Copyright Act—limits the liability of online or Internet service providers whose users infringe the copyrights of others. While the provision limits liability, it also offers significant powers to a copyright holder seeking to prosecute online copyright infringers. This article traces the legislative development of the provision, examining initial opposition by copyright holders in the music industry. That opposition changed to support after considerable expansion of the original proposal. The article concludes that the music industry successfully lobbied within a three-month window before the first version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was presented to Congress in May 1998. The expanded version of the provision included substantial new subpoena powers and takedown requirements.     

Problem based learning in legal education: Intentionally overlooked or merely misunderstood

Abstract

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT is widely considered to be central to student achievement. Unfortunately, however, on modules with large numbers of students, there is not sufficient time for academic staff to provide written feedback to all students on a regular basis. It is proposed that a potential solution to this problem is the provision of online multiple‐choice questions (MCQs) which generate detailed feedback to students who attempt them. This article critically analyses the implementation of online MCQs as a form of formative assessment on an undergraduate level three equity and trusts module. It is argued that MCQs, when prepared in the light of relevant academic theories and implemented appropriately, are a means by which deep learning can be stimulated and tested with sufficient rigour, and are therefore a suitable method of formative assessment at undergraduate level. It is also argued that there are significant advantages to be gained from making the MCQs and feedback available to students online. Analysis and synthesis of available data from the module in question bears out these arguments, suggesting that the provision of online formative assessment in this manner is indeed beneficial to students.     

"Son Of CDA": The Constitutionality Of The Child Online Protection Act Of 1998

In 1998, Congress passed a second law to regulate online content in the name of protecting children. Although the Child Online Protection Act is arguably a more narrowly tailored approach to protecting children from online indecency than the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the COPA still suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive. This article explains the two laws, analyzes how courts have treated them and finds that while there are slight differences between the two laws, the courts have thus far held that these differences are insignificant compared to their shared constitutional defects. The article recommends that Congress stop attempting to enact laws that technology and parental control make unnecessary and that would harm freedom of expression.     

A fresh start I: Education rights in South Africa

In this first part of a two-part article education rights as protected by the South African Constitution are analysed. As background, the education rights protected by section 32 of the interim Constitution and the case law that arose from that provision are discussed. Section 29 of the 1996 Constitution is then discussed with reference to the right to basic and further education, the right to education in the language of one's choice, and the right to private education. Mention is also made of the way in which religious observances maybe conducted in schools. This first part of the article concludes with the observation that the education rights in the Constitution form the basis and the spearhead of the fresh start South Africa has made in education. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Me Voici,here I Am,Here I Stand,I Can Do No Other

This article offers a Levinasian reading of the case of Airedale N.H.S. Trust v Bland (1993). My contention is that the judicial reasoning that gave rise to the decision that Anthony Bland should die was driven by an ontological imperative I submit from a Levinasian perspective the decision was ethically indefensible because it failed to recognise Anthony Bland as the other. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Internet auction fraud: The evolving nature of online auctions criminality and the mitigating framework to address the threat

Online auctions have emerged as one of the popular segments of e-commerce. The popularity of this technology-aided business model is evidenced by the continuous growth of eBay and other e-auction markets. However, this growth of online auctions has also led to a corresponding rise in deception and online criminal activity. This paper presents the findings of an original experiment undertaken to examine the evolving criminality associated with eBay auctions. The article examines eBay’s existing fraud prevention framework and evaluate its effectiveness in mitigating the risk. The research has identified foundation of eBay’s fraud problem - the inability of eBay’s fraud prevention architecture to identify and eliminate rogue traders with obscure identity and questionable reputation. The authors have proposed a proactive and holistic e-fraud prevention typology to enhance trader’s authentication to fight online auction fraud.